Transformations in the Water Consumption of Office Buildings: Water Demand Management Approaches in Sydney’s Office Buildings under the National Australian Built Environment Rating System

Abstract

This thesis uses the experiences of Sydney’s office buildings with the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) to understand what form water demand management has taken in the context of office buildings. The NABERS scheme of green building ratings aims to induce a market transformation towards sustainability. This thesis aims to examine whether the form of demand management seen under the NABERS Water for Offices rating can bring about such transformations. As the NABERS Water rating uses actual measures of water use, it provides an excellent opportunity to investigate demand management in office buildings. From a dataset containing the water consumption of NABERS-rated buildings in the first six years of the program it has been shown that there has been a large increase in the number of buildings receiving a NABERS Water rating from 2006 to 2011. There has been an associated decrease in the median water consumption of these buildings of 21% over the same period, as building managers strive for higher ratings. However, there appears to be little incentive for building managers to invest in water conservation from a strictly financial perspective, as water costs are passed on to tenants. This study found that building managers have used NABERS Water ratings to display their environmental credentials to attract high quality prospective and current tenants. The New South Wales government’s policy of only renting space with a 4.0 Star rating has played a role in incentivising this adoption. The business case upon which the adoption of NABERS has been based has also seen building managers rely heavily on the installation of cheap and easy to implement water efficiency technologies. This research concludes that the water consumption reductions seen in the first six years of the NABERS Water rating cannot be considered transformative because of the reliance on technologies. Demand management literature has called for the inclusion of social determinants of demand in approaches aiming to reduce consumption. There has been no evidence of the inclusion of these in Sydney. Rather than the socio-economic and environmental psychological determinants advocated by a majority of demand management research, this thesis argues for a social practice approach that investigates the commonly held expectations and conventions that form habits and practices of water consumption.